The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents Caroline Shaw, viola/vocals & Gabriel Kahane, piano/vocals in the New York premiere of Hexagons on Friday, April 25, 2025 at 7:30pm ET at Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center. Tickets start at $40 for in person and are available at https://www.92ny.org/event/caroline-shaw-and-gabriel-kahane.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane, the artist The New Yorker called “one of the finest, most searching songwriters of the day,” are two of contemporary music’s most compelling and emotionally direct storytellers and musicians.

With shared sensibilities and leanings in indie pop, contemporary chamber music and beyond, they have collaborated with artists from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma.

Hexagons is their new work inspired by the magical realism of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.” In this enigmatic narrative, Borges conjures a captivating and perplexing universe where the notion of infinity collides with the fragility of human understanding. Randomly arranged books, each containing exactly 410 pages, fill the Library of Babel’s infinite expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, encompassing all knowledge that currently exists or may exist in the future while paradoxically offering no true enlightenment. Shaw and Kahane invite audiences to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from a life oversaturated in information.

Hexagons, written collaboratively by Shaw & Kahane, is a 92NY co-commission. Other co-commissioners include Newman Center for the Performing Arts, San Francisco
Performances, University Musical Society, Duke Arts, Philharmonie de Paris, Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Wigmore Hall, and the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Caroline is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. 

Recent projects include the score to Fleishman Is in Trouble (FX/Hulu); vocal work with Rosalía (the album Motomami); the score to Josephine Decker’s The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple); music for the National Theatre’s production of The Crucible; Justin Peck’s Partita with New York City Ballet; a new stage work LIFE (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust); the premiere of Microfictions Vol. 3 for the New York Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth; a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film Moby Dick, co-composed with Andrew Yee; two albums on Nonesuch (Evergreen and The Blue Hour); the score for Helen Simoneau’s dance work Delicate Power; tours of Graveyards & Gardens (co-created immersive theatrical work with Vanessa Goodman); and tours with Sō Percussion featuring songs from Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (Nonesuch); amid occasional chamber music appearances as violist (Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, La Jolla Music Society). 

Shaw has written over 100 works in the last decade, for Anne Sofie von Otter, Davóne Tines, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philharmonia Baroque, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Aizuri Quartet, The Crossing, Dover Quartet, Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Miró Quartet, I Giardini, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Ariadne Greif, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Britt Festival, and the Vail Dance Festival. She has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her work as vocalist or composer has appeared in several films, TV series, and podcasts including The Humans, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, Beyonce’s Homecoming, Tár, Dolly Parton’s America, and More Perfect.

Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, Gabriel Kahane is a musician
and storyteller whose work spans the theater, club, and concert hall.

Highlights of the 2024/25 season include a return to the New York stage in a production at Playwrights Horizons of two solo works, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, which Kahane performs in repertory. In addition, he tours as a duo with fellow composer/performer Caroline Shaw in the United
States and Europe, including performances at the Philharmonie de Paris, Wigmore Hall, and the
Concertgebouw. This season also witnesses the premiere of a clarinet concerto for Anthony McGill, a
solo debut with the Orchestre National de Lyon, as well as Kahane’s San Francisco conducting debut in
Carla Kihlstedt’s Twenty-six Little Deaths.

Kahane’s discography includes five LPs as a singer-songwriter; The Fiction Issue, an album of chamber music with string quartet Brooklyn Rider; as well as emergency shelter intake form, an oratorio exploring economic inequality through the lens of housing insecurity. That work, commissioned and recorded by the Oregon Symphony, has also been heard in San Francisco, Chicago, and London, with a New York premiere this season at Trinity Church Wall Street. Upcoming recordings include Heirloom, a piano concerto written for his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane; as well as the debut album from Council, an ongoing project with violinist, composer, and conductor Pekka Kuusisto. As a theater artist, Kahane made his off-Broadway debut with the score for February House, which received its world premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. He made his Brooklyn Academy of Music debut in 2014 with The Ambassador, in a production directed by John Tiffany. In 2018, he wrote incidental music for the Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May.

Kahane maintains a diverse roster of collaborators from various corners of the musical universe,
ranging from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and Sylvan Esso, to the Danish String
Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and Attacca Quartet. As a writer, he has been published by The New Yorker
online and The New York Times; a newsletter and collection of essays on music, literature, and politics
can be found at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

A two-time MacDowell Fellow, Kahane received the 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, where he serves as creative chair for the Oregon Symphony.

About The 92nd Street Y, New York: The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a world-class center for the arts and innovation, a convener of ideas, and an incubator for creativity. 92NY offers extensive classes, courses and events online including live concerts, talks and master classes; fitness classes for all ages; 250+ art classes, and parenting workshops for new moms and dads. The 92nd Street Y, New York is transforming the way people share ideas and translate them into action all over the world. All of 92NY's programming is built on a foundation of Jewish values, including the capacity of civil dialogue to change minds; the potential of education and the arts to change lives; and a commitment to welcoming and serving people of all ages, races, religions, and ethnicities. For more information, visit www.92NY.org. (from )

• April 25

  April 25, 2025
• 92NY
  1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY

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